Abstract

This monograph is theoretically stimulating and empirically rich. It is about the ways in which debates over the future of slavery came to redefine white creole identities in Barbados between the 1780s and 1830s. Lambert has chosen for his study an island that provides comparisons and illuminating contrasts with Jamaica--the place that is often, rather lazily, taken as the model for broader Caribbean history. He has also selected a temporal span that is particularly significant, since the debates conducted between metropolitan and colonial Britons in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries raised fundamental questions about human nature, the morality of colonial relations and the character of British identity that would reverberate throughout, and after, the modern colonial period.